VOCAL VICTORIES
WAGNER’S FEMALE
CHARACTERS FROM
SENTA TO KUNDRY"

Nila Parly

Museum Tusculanum Press,

h/b

Anti-semite, racist, xenophobe and all-round
nasty bit of work – if
he couldn’t brook Jews or foreigners, could
Richard Wagner at least
find it in his heart to consider woman the equal
of man? In short,
was Wagner a proto-feminist? Danish musicologist
and singer Nila
Parly suggests the composer was ahead of his time
in terms of the
representation of women in his operas. While some
musicologists
have bemoaned the fact that the female characters
suffer the
ignominy of dying just so some man can be
redeemed, Parly argues
that Wagner’s women take control of their destiny
and emerge
victorious. (even if they do die.)

From Wagner’s own writings, it would be easy to
assume his
views chimed with those typical of his day.
‘Woman first gains her
full individuality in the moment of surrender,’
he wrote in Opera as Drama. ‘She is the Undine who glides
soulless through the
waves of her native element, till she receives
her soul through
love of a man.’ On the surface the female
characters in his operas
would appear to be similarly passive. ‘Who am I
if not your will?’
asks Brünnhilde of Wotan. But by considering
orchestration,
tonality, melody, text, stage directions and
more, Parly has built
up a picture of women who consistently forge new
material in
the operas and bend it to their own ends.
Brünnhilde might take
motifs sung by men, but she develops them in such
a way to
secure her liberation. and at the end of the
Ring, a work Parly calls
‘a thoroughly feminist tale’, Sieglinde’s tribute
to Brünnhilde from
Die Walküre effectively silences the other
motifs associated with
men – proof, says the author, that the female sex
might in future
save the day.

You have to know your Wagner to get the most out
of this book.
I would have liked to understand how the male
characters’ music
compares. More musical examples would have been
helpful and
there are some odd typos. But in general this is
a wide-ranging,
detailed analysis that is not afraid to challenge
the views of the big
names (Dahlhaus, Nattiez, Clément) and question
our attitude to
this most controversial of composers.